In their attempts at automated apprehension of the meaning of speech and text, neither linguists nor computer scientists have made much progress. In our opinion they have concentrated too much on the logical structure of the texts themselves and have neglected the structure of the world. Speech and textual information are obviously based on the structure of the world and refer to it.
Quite some progress has been made in phonological and/or phonetical, lexical, morphological, and syntactical analyses of natural language processing. However, when it comes to understanding the meaning of speech, i.e. the semantical interpretation of speech, the breakthrough has not yet been achieved. As a consequence, the pragmatical analysis, the control of tools and devices by natural speech, has also not been developed very far.
A typical example of a modern speech/text recognition system is described in the article “Enabling agents to work together”, by R. V. Guha et al., Communications of the ACM, Vol. 37, No. 7, July 1994, pp. 127-142, and reviewed by T. J. Schult in the German article “Transparente Trivialitäten; Cyc-Wissensbasis in WWW”, c't, 1996, Vol. 10, pp. 118-121. The Cyc-system described by R. V. Guha is a knowledge based system for true/false categorization of input statements. T. J. Schult points out in his article that the knowledge representation in the database used in the Cyc-system is not standardized and uses only the following relations for deduction: ‘is element of’, ‘is subset of’, and ‘has subsets’.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a new structure for the representation of knowledge in a database.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a new structure for the representation of knowledge in a database that allows for ease of knowledge increase (“learning”) and/or ease of knowledge retrieval (“understanding”).
It is another object of the present invention to provide systems based on a new structure for the representation of knowledge in a database.